I just signed the petition “Amazon.com: Protect Amazon.com Users and Indie Publishing Authors from Bullying and Harassment by Removing Anonymity and Requiring Identity Verification for Reviewing and Forum Participation” on Change.org.

Rice herself was a victim of the Amazon “bullies”, when earlier this year she began to give advice to would-be writers on the retailer’s message boards. “The discourse was meaningful and productive, questions asked and answered, and it was generally very enlightening,” said Todd Barselow, the freelance editor who launched the petition to try to convince Amazon to change its policies. “Then the bullies, trolls, jerks, whatever you want to call them, found the thread. That’s when the attacks started happening. It got very ugly very fast … With each attack, Anne tried to diffuse the situation and out these people for what they are: bullies. Well, that just made them frenzy even more. Eventually, I left the thread. It got too ugly for me. Anne stuck it out for a while, but finally she called it quits, too.”